There is an interesting change in the approach to SOA and it comes from an unexpected area.

I have worked with SOA (a great acronym which really says nothing as it has been watered out) for over 10 years and through my time I have seen companies build more and more hierarchy (or rather layers) and structure into their SOA landscape as a way to achieve “business agility through business and IT alignment and increased recycling”. If you tend to get a gag reflex by hearing the phrase, I feel you.

The idea and the intention is good, but the execution many places is to the grade F-. Instead of having achieved agility through loosely coupled services, these companies instead end up with hard-coupled services, an expensive and cumbersome organizational Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which is placed centrally to coordinate the hundreds to thousands of services we have built. It is a bit like herding sheep with a chest freezer and a rope tied to each sheep.
Let me make it clear, I don’t believe SOA, nor the ESB, is to be blamed for these failures. In my experience it has been the way they were implemented and deployed that cause the majority of problems.

Herding sheep using a chest freezer and rope

It’s messy and unstable. Not unstable as in the ESB is unstable, but unstable in that we’re desperately trying to create order out of chaos without understanding the mechanisms of action.
Let me make it clear, I don’t believe SOA, nor the ESB, is to be blamed for these failures. In my experience it has been the way SOA were implemented and deployed that has caused the majority of problems.Read more

Most companies today use SOA to integrate their systems or mobile applications, or do they?
Join me on a historical trip where we will see how integration has remained stuck in the same patterns and we will also take a look at the emperors new clothes (or SOA as it’s practiced today).
After this we will look at how to do SOA better and the principles that will make this transition possible (keywords: Event Driven Architecture, Domain Driven Design, Composite UI’s and CQRS)

Saying that you’re a .NET shop, a Java shop or some other programming platform shop is just as ridiculous as if a software tester is saying that he is just a BDD man. Hopefully he is much more than that and has a more balanced approach to software testing, so he can select that test approach that makes the most sense for the problem at hand. Wouldn’t you be worried if you went to your car repair shop and were told that they’re only a piston shop?Read more